The machine has been in development for a while, and has been delayed, but is now in early production and will ship soon. It is a commercial machine. In the future, it will be interesting to see if the technology comes down to home use - where induction might be a game changer. On the milk side, the machine doesn't steam milk, but froths the milk using a venturi to incorporate air. No water in your milk, and microfoamed milk at any temperatue is possible, even cold.

Retail price in Europe is 5k Euro per group for the espresso side; another 5k for the milk module.

John Gordon (not the guy in the thumbnail) explains the machine in 11 minutes:
FYI, Heylo is part of the VEA group - Carimali, Elektra, Bellezza, etc. ... This machine has no relation to the Fenice (failed Kickstarter induction machine).

Complex, modular and resource sparing. And Greg Scace at 8:03!

Thanks for sharing.

This machine would indeed be a remarkable game changer particularly for the commercial market if it works as advertised...just one reservation i have - this is subjective but they could have made it look more aesthetically fetching to go with its advanced features. Right now it really just looks like a black box...

It *could* be a winner but it will need to bring something to the table that the current products don't...and that will be difficult.

The Aillio Bullet R1 is an induction based coffee roaster and it's a home run because it brings the ability to roast 1k of greens on a standard 110v outlet and it's in a form that you can put under your arm and take somewhere if you want/need. No other roaster does what it does.

Simply making something different doesn't always translate to being useful. Making an induction based espresso machine can work but what will make it's function more useful? Better efficiency? Probably. Is that enough to get people to switch? Probably not.

I think products like this are important. The Decent espresso machine, the Lelit Bianca with flow control, etc are all bringing something to the table that is genuinely *different* than other machines. In the case of Lelit it was bringing a function that was traditionally reserved for much more expensive units down to an affordable price and in the case of Decent it was an unprecedented ability to monitor different aspects of pulling a shot. This will need to do that in order to get a foothold in the espresso world.

I probably should watch the video, but what's the big advantage of induction here? A resistive heating element is nearly 100% efficient and can be packaged very compactly. The only way to be more energy efficient would be a heat pump, but nobody wants a compressor running whenever the machine needs heat.

$5k euro for a flow, pressure, temperature profiling commercial machine!? Wow. It's going to find its way into people's homes. If it had a built in scale then that would be just about everything you could want. I agree the looks are almost there but not quite. I like how the screen is angled down so it's not in your face too much.

how does induction heating differ from a thermoblock?

Pretty sure it's volumetric bc in the video he specifically says it wastes no water because it only dispenses exactly what you tell it to.

My understanding is that with a normal thermoblock you'd have a resistive heater touching the block. When the heater warms up it transfers heat to the block over time. With induction, you run magnetic flux through the block and this heats the block itself.

I imagine the advantage in practice comes down to design. A resistive heater can heat a thermoblock quite quickly if it is small and there is low thermal inertia. See something like the Breville thermojets that are ready in 3 seconds. As you increase the mass it takes more time but the temperature of the block is also more stable. My hunch is the induction can heat more mass faster than resistive contact heating can.